The proliferation of electronic communication devices such as laptop computers, tablets, cellular phones, desktop computers, etc. has significantly increased the scale and complexity of computer networks. As the number of devices in networks increase, the task of routing data to and from each of the devices becomes more burdensome. In particular, network complexity can overextend the hardware and software resources responsible for performing network routing.
Many networking platforms utilize a policy table to implement rules that control the flow of network traffic. The size of the policy table can limit the scalability of the network as it grows in size and complexity. Furthermore, it is not feasible to simply populate every network switch with a high-capacity memory device to avoid running out of room for the policy table.